Doherty’s cheer team kicked off the 2025-26 school year with their first official varsity football game at Liberty High School on August 29 and they desperately need funding. As the Spartans crushed Liberty, the cheerleaders did an amazing job keeping the Doherty spirit alive in the stands, even at an away game. Bringing back the energy they displayed last year, with some new faces in their line up as well.
With many of the cheerleaders returning from last year with tons of energy, the cheerleaders are excited for where they are going next. Eva Summers, a sophomore varsity cheerleader has high hopes for the year to come in cheer.
Coming back to cheer this year, she stated, “Cheer has been one of the most memorable things in my high school experience, and this year we have three amazing coaches!” These three new coaches have given the team noticeable hope, and they have been reworking what cheer has been.
Eva explained that she loves how the coaches this year are, “working with us at a slowed down pace, and are more focussed on helping us advance our skills.” Sophomore varsity cheerleader Laila Philips feels the same way stating, “We are learning so much more this year, even though we started late, I believe this is going to be an amazing season with varsity and junior varsity.”
Laila is glad that the program is evolving and explained how they are now, “Learning new stunts, cheers, dances, and much more for this season like tumbling and more jumps for the hopefully upcoming competitions.” In short, there have been a ton of advancements on how the cheer program has been going and how it’s continuing to expand.
However, there is an issue with getting to the competitions in the first place which is funding. This is because cheerleading started later after having to wait a whole two months to figure out who the coaches were going to be this year. Funding has been a concern for the entire team, because there are very little funds at all to help pick the cheer team off the ground for competitions.
Usually fundraising starts sooner, as cheer normally starts in June, but since it got delayed, that wasn’t possible. The team is essentially low on necessary supplies for the school year such as pom poms, bows, and uniforms for the new cheerleaders. The fundraiser money is also used to supply transportation such as buses to football games and competition trips, to make travel easier for the teams.
If you wish to help support Doherty cheer in any way, there isn’t a specific way you can donate to the team as a whole unless you donate to one of the cheerleaders. Although, if you know anybody in cheer they have individual donation pages for each cheerleader on Snap Raise, and any donation to a cheerleader gets put into the funding for competitions. Any donations would be greatly appreciated, and all the fundraisers end on September 30, 2025.
